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Vicksburg

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Submitted By ch47rider
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Course Research Paper – Vicksburg Campaign

History 101 – 87 N –
06 May 2015

The Campaign of Vicksburg was “the key”, to ensuring victory and the assurance of commerce to world markets. Where the march of Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, March 1863 to July 1863, would prove compelling is that Grant would out generalize Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton and eventually start the fall of Richmond and the Confederacy of Jefferson Davis. That the campaign was a central ingredient for success according to President Abraham Lincoln and would divide the Confederacy while, giving the Union complete control of the Mississippi transportation route. With the capture of Vicksburg, the Union led by risky, yet boisterous attempts of Grant far more outmaneuvered the indecisive and ill-equipped decisions of Pemberton; and the stronghold of the Union over the Confederacy. At this time in the Civil War, the Mississippi river was the most important trade and supply route in the United States. It was the livelihood of the country and with it held the greatest economic feature to trade in the country and the world for agricultural products and their export and intercontinental transfer. It was the last stranglehold the Confederacy held on the Union and the prevention of military supply and aid to the Deep South, commerce of the middle and northwestern states to the world and a waning support of the war in enthusiasm and economic demand. President Abraham Lincoln said of Vicksburg and the importance of its seizure, “See what a lot of land these fellows hold, and Vicksburg is the key. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket… We can take all the northern ports of the Confederacy, and they can defy us from Vicksburg.” He went onto say after a trip made as a boy in a flat bottom boat to New Orleans, “I am acquainted with that region and know what I am talking

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